In nearly all computing environments, systems rely heavily on local hard drives, whether they be internal or external, that store one or more operating systems, applications, system data, user data, among other things. It is of critical importance to a well-functioning computing environment that such hard drives function properly, but the inevitable reality is that hard drives fail on occasion. For example, a computing device may cease to function properly when a hard drive becomes damaged (e.g., because of bad sectors, registry corruption, etc.). In the most severe cases, when a boot drive fails, the computing device may fail to boot up or start up altogether.
Accordingly, when recovering a failed hard drive, the first step involves setting up the drives to store data in the proper format. For example, setting up the drives may include partitioning the disks and establishing a valid file system on each partition. For instance, formatting a drive for Microsoft Windows may include partitioning the disks and formatting the drives in accordance with file systems such as FAT32 (File Allocation Table with 32-bit cluster numbers) and/or NTFS (New Technology File System). More particularly, before data can be restored at the file level, valid volumes and file systems are necessary to handle the disk input/output operations.
In existing systems, the process of performing and managing the process of setting up hard drives is quite time-consuming, in addition to requiring technical expertise. For example, a manual Windows set up generally requires anywhere from thirty minutes for Windows NT 4.0 to one hour for Windows 2000 and Windows XP ASR. Some existing systems automate various aspects of this process, which can reduce some of the technical expertise requirements, but these systems do little to reduce the time consumed by traditional set ups.
Therefore, existing systems are unable to provide rapid recovery of failed hard drives in a way that minimizes downtime and user intervention necessary for restoration. Existing systems suffer from these and other problems.